Cyrus Gengras / Kinsey

Start: 18 October 2017 8:00 pm

Cyrus Gengras

Fuckin’ Up My Name.

The brash title belies the soft tones, careful orchestration and confessional lyrics found within, making the appellation feel like a Replacments-esque move; covering the fine brush strokes of the picture with a big fat paint streak across the canvas. While the song that bears the album title is a moody, fuzz-soaked instrumental interlude, it is also found in a lyric in “Every Dog I Know”, where Gengras sings: “Everyone sounds the same, when they’re fucking up my name”.

It describes a universal feeling of vulnerable otherness, of being misunderstood, of not being heard. Which serves as a loose theme to the collection of songs: the outsider’s internal monologue.

While outwardly, Gengras cuts an imposing figure – of the hand tattoos and gold tooth variety – his songs come from a place of vulnerable confession. While the lyrics stray from easy interpretation, allusions to distance and frailty abound, with tales of brittle bones, yearning for home and hiding under covers. Like any good confessional album, there are references to love, though it is at times deemed both a curse and a game.

While much of the tones of the album could fit comfortably in a number of contemporary record collections, Gengras peppers the record with these darker themes, matched by a careful placement of discordant moments and abrupt endings, making sure the album resists being background music, no matter how soothing it can sound.

Though Gengras spent years on the East Coast making home recordings and performing live, this collection of songs serves as his first proper album and has the signature sound of an artists’ first statement: everything is on display, everything is laid bare.

Kinsey

KINSEY is the immaculately conceived lovechild of multi-instrumentalist Nick Kinsey, whose debut LP “My Loneliest Debut” lives “at the intersection of Bob Dylan, Wilco and Neutral Milk Hotel” (The Wild Honey Pie). Kinsey wrote, recorded, and produced the record in a chicken shack in New York’s Hudson Valley. Apart from the bass (contributed by The Step Kids bassist Dan Edinberg), he made all the sounds thereon. No stranger to the stage, Kinsey cut his teeth playing drums with the likes of Elvis Perkins in Dearland, AA Bondy, and A.C. Newman. “My Loneliest Debut” was released in September ’15 at which point KINSEY hit the road for months opening for Elvis Perkins and Cold War Kids across Europe and the US.